


No Sooner Met

by Black_Betty



Series: Family by Choice [1]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Baby Mutants, Coffee Shops, M/M, baby baby baby, little tiny baby, past trauma, reference to possible past abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-30
Updated: 2013-08-30
Packaged: 2017-12-25 02:22:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/947467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Black_Betty/pseuds/Black_Betty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles is a grad student attempting to get work done in the local Starbucks. Erik is more than distracting....</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Sooner Met

**Author's Note:**

> For Ikeracity, who is an enabler...and apologies to my poor brain, attempting to focus on school work, and coerced into writing this instead...(I may or may not be drawing on personal experience for a lot of this fic...)
> 
> This started out as fluff and became...something else...I have a feeling there will be more. (SO MUCH MORE).

 

> _No sooner met but they looked,_
> 
> _No sooner looked, but they loved._
> 
> ~ William Shakespeare, _As You Like It_

 

He can’t do it. There’s no way. He has twenty-five pages to write in two days and he’s barely even started. He stares at the stack of books he’s yet to go through teetering haphazardly on the edge of the small table that wobbles and jostles his large cup of black tea, and wonders how embarrassing it might be to cry in public. In a Starbucks no less.

His word document glares at him, white and blank, the cursor blinking accusingly.

 _You should have started weeks ago_ , it says.

_You had the entire summer to do this._

_What the hell have you even been doing with your life?_

He knows what he’s been doing. Remembers all to well the empty bottles of gin, the cartons of subpar Chinese food. The dent in his couch wore threadbare from weeks of restless nights and early morning infomercials, and the sunlight cutting into his hangover like a butcher knife.

He remembers his phone clutched in his palm so tightly he thought he had broken the screen. Remembers thinking he’d only call him once, just to see how he was. Remembers how one phone call turned into seven, how Raven had found him sobbing, how she’d called him a psycho and confiscated his phone, and then held him while he cried.

 _You’re a failure_ the cursor seems to say.

“Don’t I know it,” Charles mutters.

“Are you using this?” The voice startles him and he looks up, cheeks flushing involuntarily, embarrassed to be caught talking to himself.

A man is standing next to the table, one hand on the back on the spare wooden chair tucked in neatly on the other side of Charles’ table. For a moment Charles can only stare at him. He’s the kind of handsome that is surreal, and unbelievable. The kind of handsome that seems to only exist in magazines under perfectly arranged lighting and computer editing.

He looks at Charles with clear blue eyes and raises an eyebrow after a moment passes and Charles is unable to drag his eyes away from the way the muscles of the man’s stomach are clearly evident through the white cotton of his polo, neatly tucked into khaki trousers that showcase a rather spectacular waist.

Charles shakes himself, tries to force his mouth into action but only manages to spill out a tangle of words from under his tongue. He snaps his mouth shut and shakes his head, no.

The man smiles at him, something sharp and humorous radiated in his expression as he grabs the chair with an enviable grace.

So consumed is Charles with the way the man’s shoulders flex as he lifts the chair and sets it down across the coffee shop that he almost doesn’t notice the red wagon full of blankets parked next to his table. Doesn’t notice it until the man pulls it closer to his knee, reaches in and gently lifts a baby with a round, bald head from the blankets. A baby that kicks plump legs and pats the man’s face with his tiny hands when he leans down an busses a kiss against the baby’s cheek.

Charles observes a smile breaking across the man's face, broad and genuine with all his gleaming white teeth, and feels like he’s been punched in the stomach.

Amazed, Charles watches him and attempts to be subtle, tries to hide the hearts in his eyes as the man settles the baby on his knee and proceeds to feed little pieces of jam filled cake into the baby’s babbling mouth. The baby’s mouth is more gum than teeth, and he chews more on the man’s fingers than the cake, but the man only smiles and murmurs soft words in the baby’s ear.

Charles thinks he might be speaking German.

Charles thinks he might be in danger of swooning out of his chair and onto the sticky Starbucks floor.

The final straw is when the baby claps his hands together, gleefully smearing jam on his chubby fingers, and a glob on cake falls onto the man’s pristine trousers. Without an ounce of annoyance the man scoops it up and sucks his fingers into his mouth, his tongue curling around them in a way that seems well practiced and effortless.

Charles is torn between extreme arousal and heartache. It’s a confusing combination, to say the least. There is something about a man being so tender with his child that squeezes a part of himself that he usually keeps hidden and tucked away, the part of himself that holds embarrassing hopes for the future; things he wants but he knows he probably will never have.

He wants to shake himself. This gorgeous man has a _child_ , and while there is no ring on his finger, Charles has to take into account the empirical evidence that a man with a baby is most likely not a homosexual. And yet for some reason Charles finds himself crossing the small coffee shop to the island where the lids and straws and milk are kept, fiddles with the packets of sugar before summoning up his courage and grasping a handful of napkins.

He turns and before he can talk himself out of it, tentatively offers the crumpled stack of napkins to the man, who looks up at him and smiles, surprised.

“Looks like you might need them,” Charles says awkwardly, and tries on a smile, the one that usually gets people to look at him twice.

To his relief, it doesn’t fail him now. The man’s eyes widen, catching on the curve of Charles' mouth before he untangles his fingers from where the baby is clutching onto him, reaching out to take the napkins from him.

“Thanks,” he says, and smiles at Charles before turning to the baby and gently wiping at the smear of strawberry across his chin. The baby blows bubbles, oblivious, and looks up at Charles, giggling, and Charles can’t help but laugh with him,

“He’s funny,” he says, and when the man looks up at him again with something that is possibly offense on his face, Charles backtracks, “I mean, he has a funny personality…he’s a little character.”

The man smiles and looks down at the boy who is talking to his own fingers in a garbled language only he understands. He laughs,

“Yeah,” smoothes a hand over the baby’s peach fuzz hair, “thanks.” He glances back up at Charles, “Sorry, I was just surprised, most people don’t guess that he’s a boy…”

Charles double takes, looks down at the purple overalls, the pink t-shirt the baby is wearing underneath. The man shifts the little boy in his arms, straightens the overall buckles,

“I don’t want him to be forced into a prototypical gender stereotype at such a young age…I want him to grow up more open minded, more…fluid than that…” he says it almost defensively, “but most people just assume he’s a girl, which is fine, but obnoxious after a while.”

“oh…” Charles says, and then, tentatively, “well, my telepathy tends to blur past things like gender, sexual orientation…stuff like that.”

He doesn’t usually give so much of himself away, though anyone who cared to look close enough would see the scars across his temples, the battle wounds from a childhood that was less than understanding about mutation, especially of the mind.

But the man doesn’t recoil, doesn’t look uncomfortable or shocked, or disgusted. Instead he seems to brighten, looks intrigued.

Reaching out, he crooks two fingers and Charles’ watch comes alive, slithers around and tugs at his wrist. Charles can’t suppress his delighted laugh, though it makes the older woman, who is pecking away at her laptop in extreme concentration next to them, look up and scowl at him.

The man smiles, pulls Charles’ hand over to him and shakes it, his palm wide and calloused.

“I’m Erik,” he says, and nods down to the baby, “and this is Alex.”

Alex waves his hands as though he recognizes his own name, and Charles wishes for a yearning, all-encompassing moment that he still had the full range of his telepathy. Baby’s thoughts were always so pure, so full of joy and trust and genuine, complete happiness. He releases Erik’s hand and gently takes Alex’s, allowing him to wrap his tiny hand around his finger.

“Hello Alex, I’m Charles,” he says, and sends out a pulse of contentment, wafting it over Alex like a warm blanket. It’s the extent of his offensive power now, but he takes pleasure in seeing the baby pause and then laugh, bouncing up and down on his father’s knee.

He looks up again to see Erik smiling at him, warm and fond, and he can’t remember the last time anyone looked at him like that. He wants nothing more than to collapse down at Erik’s table, to say anything, do anything to keep Erik’s eyes on him, brilliant and full of something promising, something with heat and potential.

Instead he straightens and scratches at the back of his neck, an awkward tick he’s never been able to get rid of, says,

“Well, I should let you get back to your lunch…”

Erik’s face falls, though he recovers quickly, and says,

“Sure,” and Charles forces a smile, waves a hand at Alex who is distracted by his father’s shirt collar and ignores him, is about to head back to his table and the deep hellish cesspool of essay writing, when Erik calls out to him,

“Unless…would you like to join us?”

Bizarrely, his first reaction is to refuse. Something like self-preservation roars up in him, tries to tuck him back into the shell he’d built around himself in the past two months, eating Chinese food and sleeping on his couch.

But when he turns around, catches Erik’s expression, and easy curve of his smile, he swallows down the doubt, the panic that is roaring up inside his chest, forces himself to say yes. To just say,

“Yeah, sure.”

As Erik shuffles over to make room, Charles hurries back over to his table. He looks down at his laptop with the blank screen and the angry, blinking cursor, at the stack of books he’s yet to read. Looks back at Erik who is quietly telling the baby that Charles is going to eat lunch with them, and if Alex could ‘try not to smear any jam on him, it would be appreciated.’ He watches as Erik looks up and smiles at him from across the coffee shop as though there are only empty tables between them instead of the huddle of people sipping coffee, reading the paper, working away on computers, consumed within their own universe.

He snaps his laptop shut and topples the stack of books back into his knapsack.

Essay writing can wait. 


End file.
